In a networked environment, email may be routed from a sending client over the network to one or more destination recipient servers via mail transport agents. Conventional email routing involves routing an email message through mail transport agents or servers using simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP). Typically when an email message may be transmitted from a source mail transport agent to a target transport agent via one or more proxy servers. A proxy server may be a mail transport agent which may behave like an OSI layer 7 application layer which may be fairly load heavy on the network.
A proxy server may also be a network proxy that may behave like an OSI layer 4 transport layer which may not be a very flexible proxy server for transmitting SMTP commands. The typical proxy servers may not provide rich management and control over the communication between the target and source mail transport agents (MTAs), and additionally may not enable the use of custom SMTP commands for controlling the behavior of the target and source MTAs and the proxy servers.